


you make my life colorful (and the hair dye is helping)

by LilithStarlight



Series: chan's foolproof step-by-step guide to self care and coping [1]
Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Anxiety, Bang Chan has anxiety, Cute, Fluff, Gen, Hair Dyeing, Hurt/Comfort, at least i think it is, boys being boys or smth, but i wanted to give y'all a heads up it happens after chan goes into the bathroom by himself, chan is going through it, having fun, idek what this is lmaooo, just skz being there for each other :'), love these stray kiddos, oh yeah rated t for mild swearing, uhh there's a part where it alludes to the idea of self-harm but no self-harm actually happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24730861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilithStarlight/pseuds/LilithStarlight
Summary: The one where Channie is Going Thru It, and, in a mild fit of hysterics, decides to dye his hair with the dorm’s stash of leftover dye.See also; Stray Kids tries to stop Chan from dyeing his hair approximately 20 different colors, and then they encourage him dyeing his hair approximately 20 different colors. Chan ends up loving and his appreciating his members more than he ever thought possible.
Series: chan's foolproof step-by-step guide to self care and coping [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788208
Comments: 21
Kudos: 215
Collections: gowther's comfort fics





	you make my life colorful (and the hair dye is helping)

**Author's Note:**

> title from colorful by shinee :3

The series of events leading up to Chan nearly sprinting into their shared bathroom, a plastic bag held close in his arms to prevent the others from seeing it, and locking the door in order to sit on the floor in peace, aren’t particularly out of the ordinary. Perhaps it is because they are too ordinary, in fact, that Chan does all of the aforementioned things, causing his members to stare at him in surprise. He doesn’t realize this, of course; he’s too focused on his goal.

He is, as the kids say, “Going through it”.

It had been a fairly normal day, the only thing out of place being the tingly feeling in his fingers and ribs that he had chalked up to general anxiety from Simply Existing. Then of course, as the day was winding down, at exactly 9:57 PM, the tingly feeling takes over.

He had been writing down some ideas for future lyrics when the tingles spread up his arms and vine downward into his stomach. He stands up immediately, short on breath, and paces around his room, switching between wringing his hands together and running them through his hair.

He’s anxious to get up, move, do something.

‘But do what?’, a tiny voice in his head seems to ask.

Well, there isn’t much he _can_ do, it’s nearly 10 PM and everything is closed and he’s tired and until a minute ago he’d been thinking about calling it quits for the night.

His mind is running a mile every second, feeling the need to _do_ something. He tries to grasp onto literally anything that might help him scratch at and soothe his sudden desire to do something, _anything_ at this point.

His pacing finally halts when he remembers something simple he can do that might help. Something he might be able to do right now, and he might not even have to leave the dorms for it.

Chan exits his room quietly. The other members are milling about and chatting, so he doesn’t worry too much about disturbing them. He isn’t sure why he feels the need to be so secretive, it’s not like it’ll be a big deal… okay, maybe it will be, but it’s fine.

He stops in front of their big storage closet.

 _More like a tornado aftermath_ , he thinks, wrinkling his nose as he opens the door to the gigantic mess of unorganized chaos of forgotten supplies and unused Things. With his mouth set in a disgruntled line, he walks into the closet, hoping that they hadn’t thrown out the exact thing he’s looking for.

Despite the carnage that is their storage closet, it only takes him about five minutes to find the bag he’s looking for, all of the boxes and bottles of hair dye inside either unopened or hardly used. 

_Score!_ he thinks to himself. He’s getting excited now. Less apprehensive about the possible consequences, more Ready to Rock and Roll.

And here is the point where Chan decides to sprint to the bathroom, which happens to be on the other side of the dorm, and definitely in the path of every other Stray Kid in the building. And of course, they all startle at the sight of their leader running, hunched over a bag in his arms (in a way Felix, at least, would describe as “goblin-like”) and dashing toward the bathroom like his life depends on it.

He wrenches the door open and closes it behind him, locking it in a whirlwind. He’s just beginning to set the bag down on the counter when he hears the doorknob jiggle a few times. He turns to face the door, eyes wide, and sighs in relief when it doesn’t open. Instead, he hears a frustrated huff and Seungmin’s voice saying, “It’s locked.”

Chan holds his breath. A couple heartbeats pass and Chan decides it’s safe to start.

Then, there’s a knock on the door. A few seconds of silence.

“Chan? Everything okay in there?” Jisung’s voice calls through the door.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Chan answers. He’s done waiting, and he dumps the contents of the bag out on the counter. A few bottles go careening onto the ﬂoor. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Can you please open the door?” This time it’s Jeongin. “We just wanna know what’s going on.”

Chan picks up the nearest box to him; neon orange hair dye. It won’t open, so he jams his ﬁngernails under the seam and rips the top off. “No thanks,” he finally calls out to the members who must have gathered in the hallway.

Another beat of silence, and then someone begins pounding on the door, so loud it makes him jump. “Bang Chan,” Minho shouts, “you need to open this goddamn door or I’m making Changbin break it down.”

“Don’t think I won’t just because you’re older,” Changbin adds. “Try me.”

Chan’s hands suddenly shake so bad he nearly drops the box. They can’t stop him. He’s already got the dye open. “Seriously, don’t worry. It’s ﬁne, just don’t come in.” He calls out.

Felix’s worried voice comes through the door with a “Dude, what are you doing in there? Will you please open the door?”

“I’d rather not,” he says quietly. He goes to open the cap and huffs in annoyance. The neon orange is dried up, he didn’t even think that was possible. Chan grabs a diﬀerent bottle and sits on the ﬂoor, uncapping it roughly and squeezing its contents out into a plastic bowl that had come in the bag. The dye comes out deep ocean blue. He’s about to throw away the used-up bottle when-

“Chan?” says a ﬁnal, tiny voice. Chan stops moving. It’s Hyunjin. “We’re just worried about you, can you please open the door for us? We won’t even come in, we just want to see you.”

Chan stays still on the ground, hands hovering in place, still holding the bottle of dye. He hadn’t thought they would be worried about him. Why would they be? He’s just dyeing his hair. It’s not as though he’s doing anything…

Oh.

Oh shit, yeah, that could be seen as bad.

He scrambles upward, trying not to kick over the little bowl but honestly he doesn’t care as much as he had only moments ago.

He finally reaches the door and unlocks it hurriedly, yanking it open to find the rest of his bandmates staring at him with varying levels of distress on their face.

Chan is breathless suddenly, facing his family and knowing he upset them.

“Sorry,” he squeaks out. “I was just… y’know,” he ends up saying, then wincing.

Minho is the first to respond. “No, Chan,” he says, frowning. Then he softens. “We don’t know. What’s going on?”

“Are you okay?” Hyunjin pipes up, looking nervous.

Chan whines at that. This is all so dumb, why couldn’t he have just handled this normally? He could have just told them what he was doing, left the door unlocked, not sprinted, anything really. In his desperate anxiousness and, probably, mild hysteria, he hadn’t thought about repercussions. 

He realizes the members are still waiting for him to reply. So he takes a deep breath.

Releases it.

And starts.

“Okay, so, this is really dumb, but I just felt the need to just do something and I didn’t know what. And then I remembered that we had tons of leftover hair dye from all the previous music videos and stages because for some reason they let us take the dye home?” He realizes he’s looking down, so he looks back up at his members. “I didn’t want to bother you all and I kinda thought you might stop me, so I tried to be quick and secret, but I made it worse and I don’t know why and I think I was just anxious and tired and I wasn’t thinking straight and I’m sorry and I- ”

“Woah!” Someone cuts him off, and he flinches at the suddenness. He hadn’t realized he was getting out of breath, and he turns to see who had stopped him. “Breathe, Channie,” Felix says while holding one of his hands out, somewhat placating but also available for holding. So Chan takes it, hesitant.

Apparently this was the right move, because Felix sighs gently, smiling, then steps closer to pull Chan into a hug. Chan ends up smushing his face into Felix’s shoulder as he wraps his arms around him. It’s very comforting for his speeding heart, which he also hadn’t realized had become a Formula 1 driver.

The other boys come close, either joining into a now very squishy group hug or just petting his hair and patting his back or his arms.

It’s really nice, standing there in a love puddle in the middle of the hall, and when they finally go to release their leader from their loving (turned slightly competitive) cuddling, he notices that the tingles are finally, slowly leaving.

Funny how that works out.

“Channie,” Seungmin says as they all pull apart, and he smiles, surprisingly softly, up at Chan. “If you still want to dye your hair, can we join you?”

Chan perks up at that and nods slowly, a tiny smile mirroring Seungmin’s.

“Yeah!” Jisung voices. “I wanna dye my hair like 20 different colors!”

Changbin and Jeongin nod in agreement, and Hyunjin is rubbing his hands together excitedly, muttering to himself about what colors he’d pick. Felix might be vibrating in excitement.

Minho turns to look at them all, somewhat desperately.

“Okay, normally I’d immediately say yes, but don’t we have to get our stylists’ permissions first?” he says, although he definitely sounds like he doesn’t want to wait for that. He has zero respect for JYP and their rules; he just doesn’t want the other boys to be in trouble for having fun.

Seungmin scoffs at that. “It’ll be fine, Minho.”

“Yeah,” Changbin nods in faux-grave agreement. “And besides, isn’t it up to Channie in the end?”

Chan allows the smile that had gradually been growing on his face to stretch into a full grin.

“I suppose,” he says slowly, “That if we all had wildly different hair colors, it could be some sort of concept all on its own.” Minho looks one word away from being swayed into not caring completely. So, Chan presses on.

“And besides, it’s not like we’re promoting right now. We’re Stray Kids, aren’t we supposed to, y’know, stray from the rules just a little?”

And with that, the little bit of fight left in Minho is gone.

“Perfect, I’m convinced. Also, I’m calling lavender,” he says as he ducks around the others to reach the bathroom first.

“What?!” Felix is quick to protest. “No fair, that’s a great color! You’d better be willing to share!” he yells as he rushes in after Minho.

Jisung runs in as well, nearly shouting in excitement over what colors he wants to use first.

Jeongin just shakes his head in fake annoyance. “Don’t they know they need to bleach their hair first?” He looks over at Chan’s aggressively blond head. “Well, except for you maybe,” he snickers. Seungmin, his previous softness gone and replaced with his normal smirk, joins as they walk into the bathroom as well.

“Hey!” Chan exclaims, but he laughs too as he runs a hand through the blond strands of his curly bangs. “It’s not my fault JYP wants me to constantly look like a surfer.”

“Looking like a surfer, huh? That’s not the hair, Channie,” Hyunjin says, reaching over to pat his shoulder. “That’s just you,” giving him his cheekiest grin as he dashes off chortling before Chan can retaliate.

Chan only shakes his head, wiping away a fake tear. “I’m being bullied in my own home.”

Changbin shrugs, only semi-sympathetic. “You get used to it. Being on the older end of the group apparently makes us excellent roast material.”

“Boy, do I know that,” Chan grumbles, but he smiles at the end. He flings his arm around Changbin’s shoulders. “C’mon, let’s go get some hair dye and bleach and join in the dyeing process.”

He looks into the bathroom to see that Felix and Minho have already uncapped the bleach and are currently sitting on the floor and going to town on each other’s roots.

Chan grimaces. “And let’s stop these kids from making too much of a mess.”

They end up making too much of a mess.

The bathroom, of course, is far too small to fit eight young men, so they move out into the kitchen and place towels on the floor to catch any stray dye. In the process, they completely forget about every other flat surface in the kitchen and they end up with a pristine floor and dye splatters all over their counters.

None of them end up caring.

Chan spends the rest of the night (and well into the early hours of the next morning) giggling with his members as they take turns bleaching and dyeing each other’s hair, sitting on various stools, chairs or just the ground if they feel like it.

They work out a system that leads to every member putting at least one strip of color on every other member’s head. Chan’s sitting on the floor with Minho and his lavender one minute, moving to a stool in front of Seungmin for some light green the next, eventually all of them moving so many times they lose track of where they had just been.

When they’re all done and cleaned up as well as they can be, they observe their new looks. Some of them end up with ombrés, fading from one color to the next in ways that probably shouldn’t have worked but they did. Others went for the chaos route, and now have 20 different colors on their head in different places depending on how they’d felt in the moment.

Chan adores his new hair. He had been asking for suggestions when he landed on an idea that he’d absolutely loved. Seven layers of color now go across his head in a slightly messy but still perfect rainbow. His favorite part is that they all know who did which part of his hair; it’s like their little secret that the world will see but never know. He’s proud of the look, and he’s so, so happy that he did this together with his family.

When he wakes up well past noon the next day, he looks around at his still-snoozing members surrounding him.

He takes in their soft sleepiness, their new hair colors, and the love emanating from all of them.

And he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> uhh yeah stan skz stan sweet boys! i love them and i hope they are happy n healthy  
> based on the urge i and many others have to change our hair when we get the anxious need to change something/get a little cabin fever. 
> 
> everyone! stay safe and healthy, wear a mask outside, social distance!
> 
> black lives matter!!
> 
> https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ is where you can go to help by signing petitions or donating if you can


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